Making your own music might not be that hard, but making your own electronic instrument? That’s a job for the Raspberry Pi. As the DIY platform du jour, there is almost no end to the cool projects people are doing with the RasPi these days. In the BeetBox, Scott Garner combined the $35 computer with some touch sensors, a wooden enclosure, and, of course, some beets in order to make this wonderfully clever instrument.

As you can seen in the video Garner opted for the less popular, but more aesthetically pleasing golden beet for this build. These were paired with a capacitive touch sensor, which responds to a the touch of a person’s hand, which in turn works with an amplifier insider the wooden box below. The box spits out noises, just as if it was a person beat boxing. (Apparently that’s still a thing?)

The source code, which is pretty simple Python, is available on Github, as are the audio files used in the video. They could easily be swapped out for other .wav files if you wanted to customize the instrument. Some of the heavy lifting on the code front was done by pygame, which was designed for building games in Python but in this case Garner used its audio mixer module to handle the sound files. Press a beet and a kick drum, snare, clap, or cymbal sound fires off — it’s a simple as it is fun.

No instructions were included for replicating the hardware, but Garner did note that he used a MPR121 capacitive touch sensor, a homebrew amplifier based on the Texas Instruments LM386, and the Raspberry Pi to tie it all together. The wooden box was a homebrew job of Garner’s own design.